There are many occupations, sports, and hobbies that require specific safety measures in order to prevent injury. Many of these measures rely on increasing the visibility of a user or location. Specifically, brightly colored vests worn to increase the visibility of a person are typically worn by many workers to enhance their safety. Police officers often wear safety vests when directing traffic or working an accident scene. These vests are often worn over their garments and are made in high-visibility colors such as neon orange, yellow, or green. To increase visibility, these vests often include reflective tape to reflect the light from car headlights when used at night. Likewise, similar safety vests are worn by Department of Transportation personnel and many other persons whose occupations require them to work in close proximity to highways and other means of high vehicular traffic. Additionally, airport personnel use high-visibility safety vests when working on the ramp area around aircraft.
Another segment of society that often utilize high-visibility safety vests are people participating in sports such as hunting, fishing, cycling, snow skiing, and running. All of these sports rely on these vests to highlight the participant in order to protect them from being shot by other hunters or hit by vehicles whose drivers would not otherwise see them without a safety vest. Another benefit of using safety vests when participating in certain sports allow the wearer to be more closely tracked to prevent them or their companions from becoming lost. Hunter and fishermen often hunt and fish with others, but may become separated as they wander the woods or downstream from one another. By wearing brightly colored vests, the hunters or fishermen can better keep track of one another since the vests allow them to see each other from greater distances than would otherwise
Even though these high-visibility safety vests greatly improve the chance that a wearer of the vest will be seen by others, certain limitations still exist. First, a brightly colored vest may be adequate for certain applications when used in a well-lit environment, but the ability for a colored vest to distinguish a wearer from the surrounding environment greatly diminishes as the ambient light also diminishes. As mentioned above, reflective tape is sometimes used to increase the visibility of a vest. This tape works well as long as the light source, i.e. headlights, is directed to the tape, but diminishes as the light source moves away from the reflective tape. This attribute of the reflective tape creates a hazard for workers in certain situations. For example, a person working at a location such as an intersection, where a vehicle might turn towards them only when it is already close to the worker, might not be seen until it is too late since the headlights of the vehicle will not shine in the direction of the worker until the vehicle turns in that direction. Additionally, most safety vests described above will not aid sportsmen in keeping within sight of one another once ambient light diminishes to the point that the vest can no longer be seen. Reflective tape does not help in this situation as the person as the person wearing the vest may be too far away from a person with a light source such as a flashlight.
There are safety vests that have self-illumination features, such as vests made by POLYBRITE INTERNATIONAL of Naperville, Ill. These vests and others with illumination features only provide a user with a single safety feature, namely illumination, manufactured in a single configuration. A user may have the option of turning the illumination on and off, but is left with the particular configuration of reflective tape and the illumination sources established by the manufacturer. Additionally, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are often left unprotected and susceptible to damage.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,891,896 issued on Jan. 9, 1990 to Boren and assigned to the Gulf Development Company is an example of many attempts to duplicate neon lighting. Like this attempt, most prior art neon simulations have resulted in structures difficult to fabricate and providing a little in the way of weight and handling benefits. The Boren patent exemplifies this by providing a plastic panel with essentially bas-relief lettering. The material comprising the lettering is transparent and coated with a translucent material. The surrounding material is opaque. When the panel is back lit the letting tends to glow with a neon-like intensity.
The more recent introduction of light weight and breakage resistant point light sources as exemplified by high intensity light emitting diodes (“LEDs”) have shown great promise to those interested in illumination devises that may simulate neon lighting and have stimulated much effort in that direction. However, the twin attributes of neon lighting, uniformity and brightness, have proven to be difficult obstacles to hurdle as such attempts to simulate neon lighting have largely been stymied by the tradeoffs between light distribution to promote the uniformity and brightness. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,976,057 issued Dec. 11, 1990 to Bianchi describes a device that includes a transparent or translucent hollow plastic tubing which is mounted in juxtaposition to a sheet of material having light transmitting areas that are co-extensive to the tubing. The tubing can be made into any shape including lettering. While the tubing may be lit by such arrangement is likely to result in a “glowing” tube having insufficient intensity to match that of neon lighting. The use of point light sources such as LEDs may provide intense light that rival or exceed neon lighting, but when arranged in arrays lack the uniformity needed and unfortunately provide alternate high and low intensity regions in the illuminated surfaces. Attempts to smooth out the light have resulted in lighting that has unacceptably low intensity levels.
It is therefore a paramount object of the present invention to provide for an energy efficient, virtually unbreakable alternative to neon lighting.
A further important object of the present invention is to provide for a light device that is safe to transport and economical to operate while providing all of the application virtues of neon lighting including uniformity and brightness.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide for an alternative to neon lighting that is environmentally friendly, requiring no neon gas, and running on significantly less electricity that its neon equivalent.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide for a neon equivalent that is easy to install without complex high voltage electrical installations.
These and other objects of the present invention will become readily apparent and addressed through a reading of the discussion below and appended drawings.